Bøger af Christopher J. Preston

"Conventional wisdom is that wild animals are being wiped out. But conventional wisdom skips some important details. Wildlife is rebounding. Not everywhere. Not every species. But a handful of wildlife populations have reached numbers unimaginable in a century. Red deer in Europe, bison in North America, humpback whales in the Atlantic. They have all seen their populations explode. They are back from the brink, numbering in the tens, or even hundreds, of thousands. Their return thrills those who have rooted for their recovery. It terrifies those who grew comfortable without them. This book tracks-and tries to understand-these dramatic rebounds. It shines a light on species returning to forests and farms, prairies and oceans, rivers and cities. It asks how these transformations can be happening and what they have to teach"--

Mountains and freeways, oceans and apartment buildings, trees and automobiles: such things lend shape to mental activity, says Christopher J. Preston. Yet Western epistemology, since its origins, has neglected these material factors. Even postmodern perspectives on how we think and know continue to emphasize social and cultural factors over the physical environment.Grounding Knowledge claims that one of the unforeseen consequences of this anthropocentrism has been to ignore the epistemic argument for maintaining diverse natural environments. Grounding Knowledge supplies that argument. Preston first traces the separation of place and mind in Western epistemology. Drawing connections between skepticism and ungrounded knowledge, he then explores how a common insight in the epistemologies of both Kant and Quine sets the scene for more situated accounts of knowledge. After showing how science studies and cognitive science have both recently moved in this direction, Preston draws further evidence for his thesis from fields as far apart as evolutionary biology, anthropology, and religious studies. He asks what these ideas in contemporary epistemology and environmental philosophy mean for environmental policy, concluding that the grounding of knowledge strongly suggests epistemic reasons for the protection of a full range of physical environments in their natural condition.Grounding Knowledge comes at a time of increasing dialogue between the sciences and the humanities about our rootedness in all of our different worlds. Preston hopes to persuade his readers that it is not only in our biological but also in our cognitive interests to protect these roots.

The book is an introduction to some of the 1967-1974 results and techniques in classical lattice statistical mechanics. It is written in the language of probability theory rather than that of physics, and is thus aimed primarily at mathematicians who might have little or no background in physics. This area of statistical mechanics is presently enjoying a rapid growth and the book should allow a graduate student or research mathematician to find out what is happening in it. The book is self-contained except for some basic concepts of probability theory, and can be read by any undergraduate student in mathematics who has a reasonable background in probability.